Jack Carrigan, Author at Catholic Herald

Jack Carrigan

A life fighting disease and poverty in tribal Kenya

July 01, 2020

Stronger than Death: How Annalena Tonelli defied terror and tuberculosis in the Horn of Africa By Rachel Pieh Jones Plough Publishing House, 280pp, £18.99/$26 Hardly known in this country, Annalena Tonelli, born in Italy in 1943 and murdered by terrorists in Burama, Somaliland in 2003, is one of those heroic people who devote their lives

‘Peaceful deaths are not always the most holy’

March 19, 2020

A Time to Die By Nicolas Diat Ignatius Press, 180pp, £13.36/$12.99 Subtitled Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life, this absorbing book – with a foreword by Cardinal Robert Sarah who has collaborated with the author in several book-length interviews – offers a profound perspective on death. Perhaps it is redundant to observe that as

The marriage that overcame the evils of Nazism

January 09, 2020

Last Letters By Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke (translated by Shelley Frisch) NYRB, 432pp, £14.99/$18.95 In any society the number of people who are prepared to suffer for their beliefs and principles is generally very small. This is especially true in times of persecution, as was the case in the Third Reich, where overt

Why Newman loved Beethoven but not Pugin

October 17, 2019

Unearthly Beauty By Guy Nicholls, Gracewing, 352pp, £25/$31 Having waited so long for this event, it is almost a shock to see the title “St John Henry Newman” on the cover of this book. Yet this shock is one of joy – that the holiness of this great English churchman has at last been recognised

Why ‘wokeness’ leaves no room for forgiveness

October 03, 2019

The Madness of Crowds By Douglas Murray Bloomsbury Continuum, 288pp, £20/$28 Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that “where there is a crowd, there is untruth”. Douglas Murray’s satirical but serious dissection of modern media which demonstrates how, like the Gadarene swine in the parable, it is forcing all of us headlong over a cliff, interprets Kierkegaard’s

Does Holy Scripture really need ‘rescuing’?

September 12, 2019

The Lost Art of Scripture By Karen Armstrong Bodley Head, 560pp, £25/$29.95 Karen Armstrong is well known for her writings on comparative religion and for her long-held hope that a better understanding of the spiritual side of human nature will help to bring about a more peaceful and compassionate world. This work, which brings together

A message from the Coptic Martyrs on the value of faith

February 14, 2019

The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs by Martin Mosebach (translated by Alta L. Price) Plough, 272pp, £19/$26 This book introduced me to the writing of the German novelist, poet and essayist Martin Mosebach. A Catholic and lover of the Tridentine liturgy, he has tackled a subject highly suited to his gifts

Why the Soviet Union couldn’t replace Christianity

January 24, 2019

A Sacred Space is Never Empty By Victoria Smolkin Princeton, 360pp, £35/$40 This book’s title comes from a Russian proverb – as such it provides an aptly ironic leitmotif to its theme and subtitle: A History of Soviet Atheism. Whatever the later, fraught history of Russia after the Communist Party was dissolved in 1991, we

A fascinating book undermined by sleaze

January 10, 2019

Written in History: Letters that Changed the World By Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 272pp, £14.99/$20 A title such as this places a certain responsibility on the shoulders of the selector – he has made himself the arbiter of letters of real significance down the centuries, which will necessarily be a small group. In practice,

The busy genius with time for the lowly

September 06, 2018

The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters by Henry Hitchings, MacMillan, 320pp, £16.99 There have been many biographies of Dr Johnson. Indeed, immediately after his death, it was reported that 11 writers were assiduously at work on them. The most famous, Boswell’s Life, has justly become the standard for its breadth, sympathy and detail – though, as

The autism pioneer who betrayed his patients

June 14, 2018

Asperger’s Children by Edith Sheffer, Norton, 320pp, £20 The historian Michael Burleigh’s book Death and Deliverance, a detailed indictment of the Nazi euthanasia programme, known as T-4 from its Berlin address, provides the background to this new work by Edith Sheffer. She examines the career of the Austrian doctor Hans Asperger, who gave his name

The twentysomethings who took on the Nazis

May 09, 2018

Conscience Before Conformity by Paul Shrimpton, Gracewing, 328pp £15.99 This book provides a detailed exploration of the religious and cultural background of the principal players in the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany. The movement’s fame rests partly on the success of the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days and partly on the understandable

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